Wednesday, January 19, 2011

As My Friend...You Know Who You Are...Says..."It Is All About Me Today!"

It is "All About Me" today! The prompt in Tracey Clark's Picture Winter Class was to take a picture of yourself and remember your life for what it is today. This was a fun one for me!

To my dear friend, mmmm...hemmm....mmm...Amanda...when is it NOT going to be about you? Hee Hee. To those of you reading this...the above statement was typed out of love and laughter. I guess it is an inside joke, so not too funny to anybody else. But, makes me smile! Her too!

I had somebody ask me how I did this...so here is my attempt at explaining it. Please email me or comment if I am not clear on something.

To start I took a picture of myself with the light hitting the side of my face

near a black door in my daughter's bedroom. With sharp focus on my eye, using a tripod.

Then I edited the picture like I normally do in photoshop, for color, contrast, crop, etc. I also sampled the black from the background of this picture and pianted over any details in the door that I didn't want to show up in the finished picture, used a soft brush for this effect.

The first thing I did was use the "type" tool and used the several different fonts for each word. Each word is it's own text layer. I also lowered the opacity of of the word "self" until I liked the way it looked. I then moved the "my" on top of the "self" text layer and made the "my" black. That is how the "my" looks cut out of the "self"...just black.

To make all the other text talking about all the wonderful things in my life...

I made a new document the same size as my picture file...in this case an 8x8 inch document. I then typed in the font called "Adler", all the good things in my life. I then clicked off the background layer, so the gray and white checkerboard comes up in Photo Shop stating that the image is now transparent. Oh, when I typed all this out, I used the color picker to sample the blue/green color from my eye. Okay, so then I saved that document with the background layer still turned off as a .png file. If you haven't ever saved a .png file, you do it the same way you save a .psd or .jpg file. Just be sure to save it to a place where you can find it again, such as your desktop.

Now open that recently saved .png file and move it over the top of your photo. You can change the blending mode of the .png file to "overlay" or whichever you want at this time.

After that I created a mask on the same layer that had my .png on it, and brushed over where I didn't want the blue/green text to show up...my face. Then I duplicated the .png with mask by clicking "control key and J" at the same time. On this copy layer I changed the blending mode to"color burn" to make the text on my face darker. I think I had to paint with my brush to bring back the text on this layer first. So, if it was a white mask, I used a white brush to bring back the text. But I wanted it to look like the text was fading away from my face. So I made a selection using the elliptical marquee tool and set the feather to 150 pixels. I then clicked on "delete" and it will delete the center of the elliptical marquee and feather out. If there were other places I didn't want any text, I created a whole new selection and did the same thing...or I just moved the selection with the arrow keys on my keyboard to move the selection.

I finished by adding a "stroke" to the boarder of my picture that was 25 pixels in white. Then a second "stroke" in black at 5 pixels. Both of those strokes were set to "center". Both of the strokes were also on their own new layer in the layers palette. Just in case I messed up or something. :)

Ended by sharpening the image, then making a copy as a web sized file.

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Hi! Thank you so much for taking time to check out this blog. This is an archive of a blog I kept during the process of becoming a professional photographer. I may post on here from time to time as I learn new techniques, or if I have some photography news that isn't client related. Please feel free to comment, critique, and question away. You can contact me jamiesoloriophoto@hotmail.com or visit my website, Jamie Solorio Photography.